For larger servings or if you'd like some left overs, we suggest a full 1/2 lb per person. For appetizer quantities and not much left over, we suggest 1/4 lb per person. I don’t think they need to cut the trees down to get the bark, so environmentalists can eat happily.We advise buying small quantities more frequently to avoid long term storage because the complex flavors and aromas of good cheese will change and degrade over time. The cheese is washed in beer as it ages, so perhaps alcoholics should steer clear. Made with raw milk from one of the 45 Ayrshire cows on their farm, using traditional, meaty rennet. once said, ‘Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness’, but he obviously never tasted Winnimere. Winnimere, astoundingly, falls not short of its reputation, but rather rises to it. I have found, however, that these cheeses that most challenge, most excite. It is a cheese the texture and taste of which is so far unique to my experience and challenging to my long-cultivated gustatory open-mindedness. And certainly not for the faint of palate. I have not sampled enough American cheeses to claim that this is the country’s best, but I will say that all other American cheeses henceforth have a lot of work to do. Together, the two flavors combine for perhaps the most intriguing contrast I have yet to taste. The sourness would be nearly untenable if not for the delightful, cutting creaminess. Once I knew what was coming, however, I genuinely couldn’t stop. The bitterness is truly overwhelming and, admittedly, requires some acclamation. The cheese is marked by a pleasant earthiness contributed by the bark wrapping, which additionally gives the cheese its shape. This, no doubt, is the effect of the beer in which the cheese is washed during its aging. After a moment, a distinct bitterness arises that lingers throughout and takes off markedly just before the finish. Immediately, one is struck by a cool, doughy creaminess that adheres pleasantly to the teeth.
The flavor, of course, is markedly different. The experience is not unlike eating yogurt – the texture is comparable and the mode of intake indistinguishable. I am not ashamed to say that I scooped said seepage directly into my mouth with a spoon, as suggested. I took a half-wheel home and let it sit for the requisite hour or so, watching the dough slowly slough from between the rinds onto the wooden board, forming a veritable puddle of fatty spillage. The Kehler brothers recommend that, instead of slicing into the wheel, you pull away the top of the rind and ‘let the bark form a bowl for the spoonable paste within.’ Regrettably, no one is paying me to do this yet and so I was unable to afford an entire wheel. She watched me as I tasted it, and then, ‘Well’, she asked, ‘did it let you down?’ She was positively excited to slice me a bit. Often, I’ve found that cheeses which come with such uncontested media acclaim are given a condescending eye in the cheese shop, but when I asked the woman behind the counter for a sample, she smiled and told me just how great she thought it was. Most folks consider it among the country’s best. It is difficult to find a negative word about the cheese anywhere at all. The hype surrounding Winnimere is intimidating. After curding, the cheese is wrapped in bark stripped from the farm’s spruce trees, washed in beer from an award-winning local brewery, and left to age for sixty days. Winnimere is only made during the winter months when the milk attains its ‘peak richness’. Andy and Mateo Kehler maintain a small herd of 45 Ayrshire cows and use their protein-rich milk to produce five different varieties of artisan cheese. Jasper Hill is most noted for its 22,000 square-foot underground aging facility, which stores and ripens a number of small-scale local cheeses and distributes them to a large-scale market, but the Kehler brothers began by making their own cheese, on their own farm, with their own milk. Winnimere is the premier creation of Jasper Hill Farm, a small, family-owned dairy in the rocky hills of Greensboro, Vermont. However, for those of you who aren’t turned on by thoughts of pork bark and fat-sap, I must say that my own experience with Winnimere was just as delicious and inspiring without all of the porcine flora. If the image of crunching your way, mouth agape, through leaves of crackled pig fat, with drops of grease dew dripping softly from the meaty foliage onto your lard-glistened lips doesn’t make your stomach rumble, then you’re probably in good company. ‘Cheesemakers of the United States, please don’t hate me,’ Gordon Edgar writes, ‘but I think this is my favorite American cheese.’ Edgar goes on to say that he doesn’t usually go in for wordy, associative nonsense, but he simply must describe the taste of Jasper Hill’s Winnimere as something like ‘eating your way through a bacon forest in autumn’.
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